


The Deal

by Highsmith (quimtessence)



Category: Ready or Not (2019)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Biting, Character Death Fix, Curtains, Deal with a Devil, Developing Relationship, Domestic, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fingerfucking, First Kiss, First Time, Fix-It, Making Out, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Scent Kink, That AU Where Grace Makes Her Own Deal with Le Bail, Vaginal Fingering, Wet & Messy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 14:57:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21199544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quimtessence/pseuds/Highsmith
Summary: Grace makes a Deal. Of course she fucking does.She starts with, "I didn't sell my immortal soul, if that's what you're asking," because some things you just need to get out of the way first."Never crossed my mind." His tone is strangely vacant.





	The Deal

**Author's Note:**

> Because I "watch" Dead Meat Podcast (as we all should), I knew this film was gonna become an absolute favourite. I've been obsessed with it since I saw it the previous Sunday. Daniel and Grace are my favourite characters, and that basically means my brain is in fic mode right now.
> 
> (As a side note, how are there only 14 fics posted to the AO3 fandom tag? I'm dying.)

"I hope you at least negotiated better terms," Daniel says.

She's not an idiot—_anymore_—but does reply with, "Better than your ancestor got," and Daniel smiles a bloody smile that's the most genuine thing she's seen him do by a mile. The lights of the ambulance parked behind them cast the rest of his face in pinkish hues.

"Good," he nods. Then he explains how anything resembling local authorities have been bought out more than a century ago.

She says, "Huh," and means it. Maybe still a tad naïve, then. Something to work on. Self-improvement on both sides.

So if they're not going to jail, that only leaves the question of what happens next.

*

It's sort of a scandal. Figures.

Without a shadow of a doubt, Grace does not get rich people, despite being, on the face of it, one of them going forward. Daniel also has to patiently explain how the entire Le Domas family (sans the two of them) exploding is less of a big deal than the two of them surviving under unexplained circumstances.

"No one's asking for an explanation," she says. It's true; no one has. Not to her face.

Pouring himself another finger of scotch, Daniel says, "They're too afraid." Is drinking alcohol even allowed in hospitals?

"No nosy neighbours?" she prods.

"Not classy, darling." He only slurs a little at the end of his sentence. Grace sighs.

*

Collecting on the mansion's insurance is almost a formality. It's been a month, most of which she spent in a private hospital ward, and she's yet to fully grasp the extent of how much fucking money this goddamn family actually has. Since she's Alex's widow and Daniel is the eldest son, their shares are pretty much equal, Daniel's even topping hers by a slight margin. All this the layers tell her while she's still got three separate IVs in her arm. Overall, she finds little comfort in the knowledge.

_It's been a month_, though, and Daniel seems intent on drinking his half of the inheritance in the smallest possible amount of time.

It's been a full month when she finds herself sharing one of the family's multiple—as in plural, as in _more than one_—vacation homes with Daniel. It more than vaguely resembles a small castle. She gets lost at least twice per day. It stops being fun after the first hour, but she's yet to figure out what her alternatives are, and, after all, staying momentarily put requires no actual mental effort. Her days are now spent being emotionally drained, for the most part. She ponders whether changing the curtains in each room would make it less likely to get lost in the place, but abandons the idea quickly enough.

One evening, maybe a couple of weeks into their strange living arrangements, when she finally manages to find the dining room prior to her food becoming stone cold, she notices Daniel's barely touched his whiskey on the rocks by the time the second course is served. Condensation is dripping down the side of his glass when the last of the plates and cutlery is being collected by the same pair of quiet servants who have been tending to their entire meal.

Grace has noticed the staff is on a heavy rotation, but has been avoiding bringing it up. She has an inkling as to why, and promptly finds that she does not mind in the least.

What she doesn't have even the smallest clue about are the whys of Daniel's sudden bout of sobriety. Questioning it doesn't seem like a good idea, though, so she shuts her mouth on another bite of apple pie and refrains from asking, hoping against hope that leaving it alone won't come back to bite her in the ass.

*

It comes up, her Deal, because of course it does, just not in the way she'd imagined.

Daniel starts out their after-dinner time in the library by making it clear he's not kicking her out, not least of all because half of the house is hers anyway. Grace isn't sure she likes the direction this is going, especially as he's already on his third glass of the night. They're five weeks into living together. She doesn't know what it all means, so she listens and tries not to jump to any conclusions, not straight away.

"I need to know in how much shit you got yourself into, and how much of that is on me. Or because of me, I guess." He shakes his head and his jaw shifts, as if there's more he'd like to say if only he could find the right words or articulate or whatever. Grace wishes he would, as she's steadily becoming more confused by the second. The she realises she's being incredibly dense.

The point is brought even closer to home when Daniel plainly asks, "What did you trade for me?"

"You don't ask the simple questions, do you." She doesn't even attempt to make it sound like a question, because it's really not, nor should it be. Daniel has the right to ask.

He huffs, sounding vaguely amused, but looking anything but. "How does that fall into the, uh, old arrangement?" he tries, cocking one eyebrow.

Grace muses that over for a quick second, and its implications. "It doesn't cancel out the first deal. I don't think. You're stuck a widower, I'm afraid," she states, and watches for a reaction.

"I'll drink to that," and he cheerfully downs his glass. The noise of his banging it down onto the coffee table between their seats echoes oddly in room, almost like faraway thunder.

Grace frowns. "Right. I'm not technically part of the family, but." How do you finish that sentence? "Right," she says again. "Which just leaves—"

"—whatever deal _you_ made."

Neither says anything for a long moment. The fire merrily burning in front of them is casting dancing shadows on the library walls. Grace avoids glancing away; she's wary of shadows not her own these days. Doesn't feel quite comfortable looking back in Daniel's general direction either. Fuck.

She starts with, "I didn't sell my immortal soul, if that's what you're asking," because some things you just need to get out of the way first.

"Never crossed my mind." His tone is strangely vacant.

Grace sighs deeply. The fire continues burning, the words on the tip of her tongue. She might as well tell him. After all, from a certain point of view, you could say it's all so very _respectable_. Makes her almost gag thinking about it. Makes her sick to her stomach that he might say it himself.

"What's the opposite of complete bodily autonomy? Whatever that is, I owe him it, one day in the year, for however many years you keep—you know."

Daniel's intake of breath is harsh and immediate. A log crackles.

*

It takes her until the next morning to remember his words right at the start of their evening.

"What were you on about? You know, with not kicking me out, all that crap..."

"Oh," he says around a sip of coffee. He places the cup back on the table slowly. Doesn't quite meet her eye to say, "I was going to offer to leave, or that you should run away, or something. Preemptively. In case the terms—whatever. Doesn't matter." He licks his lips absently. "I was drunk anyway."

Grace nods and lets it go.

*

They don't talk about it after that. At all. It's off-putting and weird, but Grace figures they're stuck in a weird situation in and of itself, so she doesn't push it and he doesn't ask any other questions, and the next thing she knows it's been another couple of months.

They find ways to keep busy. Or not bored. Or not _entirely_ bored.

She knows how the pieces are supposed to move on a chessboard, the rules easy enough to recall. He teaches her how to play _well_, and it fills up their evenings. Her days are spent picking out curtains from catalogues and picking up the slack when it comes to interviewing replacements for their household staff. The family's business endeavours seem to be running themselves on their own, and profitably so, even with the distinct lack of goat blood-letting and general animal sacrificing.

Neither leaves the house for very long, or at all, most days. Grace gets lost less and less, until she's finally able to admit to herself she knows this house like the back of her hand. Daniel goes through long stretches of time without a drop of booze, finally succumbing to week-long binges, then gradual sobriety for as long as he can, longer and longer as the months pass. Rinse. Repeat. Whatever.

*

It was bound to happen eventually. If she's being honest here.

OK, so not, like, in a weird way. _Weirder_, that is, than what they're currently dealing with.

Back when she and Alex were throwing around the idea of marriage, Daniel had first shown up out of the blue, and Alex was being a dick about everything, and Daniel _looked_ at her. Then the drunk brother who kept hitting on her cliché became a nuisance and nothing more. He never made more than the most superficial of moves, and she wasn't interested as long as Alex was in her life. And now it's less easy to rationalise it away what with the proximity and the thing where neither of them is moving out and moving on with their lives.

They're both adults and thus the voice in her head telling her it's all so very inappropriate gets to shut the fuck up. Because she misses kissing, and making out, and fingers and—everything. Fucking _everything_.

Turns out, Daniel smells good. Of fucking course he does. They know each other's habits entirely too well by now, so it should hardly come as a surprise that the guy bathes and purchases overpriced branded men's crap online, which he then uses to smell appealing and like she could lick and bite him everywhere and she'd still walk away with his scent memorised. She's just never had an opportunity to get close and make a judgement call, until this particular time. It helps that the alcohol fumes have been absent for the better part of a month now.

When it happens, they've been playing chess in the library for close to an hour, Grace winning and smug about it, which is maybe why, when she glances up from the board and sees him _looking_, it doesn't occur to her to do anything other than sit up and move around the table into his space.

They end up necking on the couch like teenagers. His mouth is warm and his lips softer than she'd imagined. He's laid back about it all, leaving the ball more in her court, going along with whatever she likes, drawing back whenever she does and harshly licking inside each time she presses close. She can't remember the last time she was so hot for it, and doesn't want to either.

Nothing much matters when his palms are big and warm, and cup her back just right underneath her worn household tee. She takes deep breaths through her nose, her mouth otherwise occupied, and feels a bit as if she's going to start hyperventilating any moment now, but there's something about it which has her flushing and turned on even more from it. Little bites to her bottom lip turn into him sucking on her tongue and her hand playing with the top button on his jeans. Then his hands go to her own pair of jeans, which he helps her discard without missing a kiss, and then to her hip bones to position her in his lap more comfortably. Her breath catches at the stretch of her thighs around the width of his.

She rides his fingers right then and there, two slid inside her and crooked just right, his thumb running little circles over and over again across her clit, getting her wetter still, the fingers thrusting all sloppy from it. They don't even take her underwear off, and they end up a mess with the way she clenches up around him in wrecking waves. Swivelling her hips right at the end while his teeth are biting at the side of her neck has her body trembling all over.

They make out for hours afterwards, until her lips are sore and her mouth aches, and a little bit after that, too. She finds out Daniel has a nice cock he knows how to use well.

*

It hasn't been a year yet, but it feels as if decades have passed already.

She asks him to move into her side of the house, specifically her bedroom, not long after they start fucking. It's more convenient this way. Her pillows smelling like him definitely goes in the plus column, too.

One night he tells her, "I know you know we're not going to play his game, right?" As if she's a moron. She's mildly offended and tells him so.

"It's good to verbalise this shit. You're not exactly an open book," he replies.

Figures he'd be a dick about playing the Devil.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [rhubarbdreams @ tumblr](https://rhubarbdreams.tumblr.com/) if you want to share in my obsessions.


End file.
